Historic Louisiana

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This Cajun girl is cooling off from her
exertions in the field.
COURTESY OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS,
TULANE UNIVERSITY.
HISTORIC LOUISIANA
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produce foodstuffs. Maroons worked as
outside labor for loggers and other individuals
charged with producing lumber for the export
trade. Maroons cut trees, squared the logs,
and hauled them to the sawmills. The
sawmills paid cash. “The maroons living in
the ciprière maintained a symbiotic
relationship with sawmill owners. They cut
and squared cypress logs, dragged them to the
sawmills, and were paid for each log
delivered.” 7 The difficulty of maroon life was
plain to the slaves who remained on the
riverfront. This helps explain why most slaves
remained at work on the plantation.
The economic system led to strange
behavior in the society of slaves. Usually
masters compartmentalized the various aspects
of slavery—compulsion, commerce, and
humanity. When these aspects conflicted,
masters often saw unexpected results. The
grandson of Delfau de Pontalba, Joseph
Delfau de Pontalba, had a favorite worker
in Augustin, who supervised an elaborate
drayage business for Pontalba. He arranged
to have carts available to haul goods to
and from the plantations, as well as to
transport the extensive building materials
Pontalba purchased to build his houses in New
Orleans. Yet, Augustin was also responsible to
bring Pontalba a glass of milk early each
morning. One week he was consistently late in
bringing the milk, so Pontalba’s solution was to
have him whipped. Augustin promptly fled.
Pontalba was disconsolate, more so after he
noticed that his carts were not running on
time. Fortunately for Pontalba, soon afterwards
Augustin’s uncle, Simon Charles, paid Pontalba
a visit. He said, “that there had never been any
runaways in his family, and that he would not
have Augustin, his nephew, fall into any such
habit; he told me that he was the brother of
Marie-Jeanne, mother of Augustin, and he
asked me for a note that he might go and fetch
him.” Pontalba reported to his diary later, “I
actually found him at the house when I
returned at ten that night; he fetched Augustin
before me and asked that the latter be forgiven,
pledging himself for his good behavior in the
future, this event gave me great pleasure, I can
assure you, as no one could replace Augustin in
taking care of my drayage, which was
beginning to fall behind, and you may say that
the uncle easily obtained forgiveness for his
nephew.” 8 The remarkable attitudes conveyed
in this incident need to be examined. Simon
Charles plainly led a family that did not feel
that the end of the world was at hand. He
could see that Augustin was in line to be freed;
that slavery was only temporary. In short, the
society continued to employ slaves, but it was
not a slave society. It might very well have been
a society where all blacks gradually achieved
freedom. It was not yet forced into a mold
where blackness meant only slavery.
Across from New Orleans, in the area later
to be Harvey, Louisiana, two different families
of freed Negroes operated independently on
the sawmill canals. In the late eighteenth
century, Negro Gabriel Villars lived on a
sawmill canal (later Harvey Canal) with his
Native-American wife, Tonton, and their
daughter, Tonton. Carlotta, a Negresse freed
by Claude Joseph Dubreuil, Jr., resided along
the Dubreuil Canal. She manufactured an
alcoholic beverage, probably the rum-like
tafia, and sold it to blacks and whites alike.
The French had come to Louisiana with
riches in mind. They were all capitalists or, as
they would say, bourgeois. Slavery was a tool
to achieve wealth. Three later groups of
immigrants were initially anti-slavery in their